The Linux Foundation: Open source is eating the software world

Jim Zemlin, an executive director at the Linux Foundation, was the keynote speaker at the OpenStack Summit in Paris on Monday. "Open source is literally eating the software world," Zemlin said, paraphrasing a quote from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen in a 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "Software is Eating the World."

Eighty percent of the code that enterprises use today is open source, he said. The reason for the switch is simple: Software has become a way to add value to businesses, and open source is the best way to use a lot of software. "There's too much software being written for too many organizations," Zemlin said.

Managing External R&D: A New Imperative

The world's top high-tech companies collectively spend tens of billions of dollars on R&D, and much of the code comes from outside the organization, he said. This has created a new job category: managing external R&D. Companies such as Google, HP and NEC have people who specialize in managing open source software development.

Now that it has become the dominant form of enterprise software development, it's important for every company to understand how to choose the right projects, how to "social code," how to integrate open source code into their own environment, and how to contribute back to central projects. "Open source collaboration does require new skills," Zelin said.

Big users collaborate like crazy on open source approaches

In addition to individual companies dedicating resources to managing their relationship with open source technologies and communities, there is an ongoing effort to focus on the systematic management of a large number of open source technologies from the perspective of the end user. Called TODO (Open Talk, Open Develop), the project was launched in September by a handful of tech giants, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Box, GitHub, and others.

The companies created TODO as a clearinghouse for a wide variety of open source software. Its mission was vague in the early days, but the founders said it would do things like create technical documentation for certain open source projects to make them easier for others to deploy. A key part of the TODO program is that one of the members is using open source technology in production. When anyone is looking for a software solution, the organization has confidence that the solution has been used by a large company.

The next open source blockbuster

It's important to think about open source systematically, and if a company wants to take its place as the next big thing in open source, it's critical to have people working on that work, and today that's OpenStack, Zimlin said. "OpenStack, without a doubt, is a blockbuster," he said.

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, said the open source cloud computing architecture is popular because it satisfies the desire of developers to choose IT shops. It gives IT departments the freedom to choose hardware and deploy their own clouds, and also gives developers the flexibility to configure their environments through APIs.

There's a lot of interest in OpenStack in Europe, as evidenced by the turnout at the summit. Blais said the foundation sold more tickets than ever before for the Paris summit, but the city's popularity may have played a role, too. Thierry Carrez, director of the engineering foundation, said half of the attendees were European (about 10% more than the last summit in Atlanta). By a show of hands during the keynote, the vast majority of attendees were attending an OpenStack summit for the first time.